Review: Bucket List a buddy flick for boomers

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 10, 2008

Needless to say, that list will change, maybe take on a certain urgency, if you learn you have a terminal illness. What's the old adage? "Nothing focuses the mind like the knowledge of impending death."

That's the premise of Rob Reiner's engaging but well-worn comedy "The Bucket List." Pair up a rich health-care mogul and a working-class mechanic in a hospital room, tell them both they have months to live and let them work out a list together. The rich guy will pay for it. The mechanic-philosopher will fill in the blanks, provide "meaning."

Jack Nicholson devours the scenery as hospital magnate Edward Cole. Morgan Freeman is Carter Chambers, a guy who has had a real life, just not a lot of fun in it. They are two dying cancer patients thrown together who decide to make their last months memorable, at least to themselves.

Theirs is a reluctant partnership. They have little in common. The rich guy is a loner, a bon vivant, a jerk who intentionally gets people's names wrong just to put them in their place. The mechanic is a kindly "Jeopardy!" fanatic, a reader, with a wife and grown children who love him. One has sacrificed family for a lifestyle and gathering wealth, the other has given up himself for his family.

But they're "in the same boat," as Cole growls, raising a Nicholson eyebrow. They shouldn't go gently into that long night. They should sky dive, climb a pyramid, "witness something majestic" and wander the Taj Mahal, drive that 1965 Shelby Mustang 350 one of them has always wanted.

So they do.

"Bucket List" is a movie that goes down like hospital food - pre-digested. The "list" isn't that original, though the movie's travelogue elements are striking. If they faked sending Freeman, Nicholson and crew to Egypt, Africa and skydiving, they certainly did a good job of it.

The casting is so pre-played that they landed Rob Morrow, years past his "Northern Exposure" duty, as a doctor, and Sean Hayes, not far removed at all from his "Will & Grace" finger-snapping, as Cole's fey and smart-aleck assistant.

And then there's the matter of narration. Yes, Freeman's character tells the tale in voiceover. Yes, at some point he says, "That's the first time I laid eyes on Edward Cole." If he didn't once narrate, "That's when I first laid eyes on Maggie Fitzgerald" ("Million Dollar Baby") or "That's when I first laid eyes on Andy Dufresne" ("Shawshank Redemption") or whoever he laid eyes on in "Feast of Love," well, you would swear he did.

First time I laid eyes on Morgan Freeman, in 1987's "Street Smart," he had some anger, some edge, not this predictably sweet old storyteller he's been playing far too often since Miss Daisy needed a driver. It's not really his fault that he lends such a homey, comfy vocal presence to the movie's soundtrack. But that is incredibly lazy filmmaking. To steal a word Cole utters about the whole precious idea behind the movie, it's "cutesy." All that said, there are big laughs and minor moments of grace in "The Bucket List." It's also fun to watch these two swap lines, Nicholson angry and antic, Freeman laid back and serene.

Clint Eastwood had to stretch to be the active one to Freeman's passive presence in their films together. Nicholson, his head shaved for his character's brain surgery (bald, he looks like Rod Steiger) doesn't have that burden.